You probably run it with A3D... tried turning it off?

With the same driver and that 3.12 update I got no crashes, but recurring popping noises on Vortex2.

Since both the Voodoo and the sound card run on the PCI bus, maybe it's a bus contention issue...? With the higher full screen resolution the load on the graphics card is higher which may cause it to be more error prone. Just a theory 😀

Missing info :

Motherboard - Intel SE440BX-3 Gateway OEM Variant

I tried 2.041 and 2.048 Aureal AU8830 drivers and both exhibit the freezing. If I remove the drivers, but not the card, the game will behave with a Sound Blaster 16 (although the sound quality is poor).

There is no specific function for turning the A3D off in the game, I have tried settings like DirectSound and Use3DAudio to False without effect.

have you tried running in d3d ?

And why would the sound quality be "poor" on SB16, save for those missing questionable effects...? A revision with bad SNR? I wouldn't call 16-bit 44100 Hz poor quality, or did I miss something?

I tried removing the network card and moving the MX300 to a different slot. This morning I ran the game and it got through the flyby and most of the first level before freezing. It did freeze and hang the system , the second time taking the system with it. I shut the system off and touched the heatsink on the Voodoo 3 card and it was too hot to keep my finger there. I have seen posts about a fan on or near the card being helpful. I have room for a slot fan. Otherwise maybe I should start with the earliest AU8830 drivers and work my way up.

Testing with the first release of the drivers, 4.06.2000 showed no improvement.

I removed the Voodoo 3 3000 card and inserted an AGP Dell OEM TNT2 Model 64. After upgrading to v226 final for Direct3D support, I tried the game and while it ran a little slower, I encountered no freezes. Unfortunately v224 and above disable A3D. From what I have read, v226 seems to be the first version with really decent Direct3D support.

So, the game does not have a problem with either the Voodoo 3 or the MX300, but together in fullscreen mode they will freeze. Curiously, it will not in a windowed mode. My pet theory is that the PCI bus is somehow to blame, between audio, video, storage and everything else that goes through it.

d1stortion wrote:

And why would the sound quality be "poor" on SB16

Lack of directsound support ? and limited bandwidth of the isa bus

ps: did you try d3d with the v3 ?

SB16 has Directsound support and Unreal can do those reverb and doppler effects in software.

Suggesting D3D with a Voodoo card is always a bad idea and would lead to more problems. It'd be more logical to suggest software rendering for debugging the issue. Not to mention the original release lacked such a D3D driver..

Also, I get freeze issues with SGL and the original Unreal release after i play it for an hour and i'm also using a PCI soundcard (SBPCI128)... and many other games work fine without a hitch.

I think now its just a bad combination of graphics and sound card. Since Unreal only supported A3D 1.0 and was released at a time when the Voodoo 2 was king, the original release versions would presumably work best with those devices.

I *think* I may have found the solution to my crashing problems. I was fiddling with the advanced options and turned on "SlowVideoBuffer". After that I was able to play in Glide in full-screen with the A3D for what seemed to be a substantially longer period of time than I ever have before. This is with a version of Unreal before all the patches which made it look and sound like Unreal Tournament. Maybe the Voodoo 3 was simply too fast for the program, especially in full-screen mode with no need to render Windows to slow it down.